After so many disappointments with biofuels, it comes no surprise that a new independent study has concluded that “the best ways to improve energy security, mitigate global warming and reduce the number of deaths caused by air pollution are blowing in the wind and rippling in the water, not growing on prairies or glowing inside nuclear power plants”. The author is Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford. Mr. Jacobson also warns about so-called “clean coal”: it “is not clean at all”, he says.

Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed, major, energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability. His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. The paper with his findings will be published in the next issue of Energy and Environmental Science but is available online now. Jacobson is also director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford.

“The energy alternatives that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful,” Jacobson said. “Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels.” He added that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.

To place the various alternatives on an equal footing, Jacobson first made his comparisons among the energy sources by calculating the impacts as if each alternative alone were used to power all the vehicles in the United States, assuming only “new-technology” vehicles were being used. Such vehicles include battery electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and “flex-fuel” vehicles that could run on a high blend of ethanol called E85.

Wind was by far the most promising, Jacobson said, owing to a better-than 99 percent reduction in carbon and air pollution emissions; the consumption of less than 3 square kilometers of land for the turbine footprints to run the entire U.S. vehicle fleet (given the fleet is composed of battery-electric vehicles);l the savings of about 15,000 lives per year from premature air-pollution-related deaths from vehicle exhaust in the United States; and virtually no water consumption. By contrast, corn and cellulosic ethanol will continue to cause more than 15,000 air pollution-related deaths in the country per year, Jacobson asserted.

Because the wind turbines would require a modest amount of spacing between them to allow room for the blades to spin, wind farms would occupy about 0.5 percent of all U.S. land, but this amount is more than 30 times less than that required for growing corn or grasses for ethanol. Land between turbines on wind farms would be simultaneously available as farmland or pasture or could be left as open space.

Indeed, a battery-powered U.S. vehicle fleet could be charged by 73,000 to 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines, fewer than the 300,000 airplanes the U.S. produced during World War II and far easier to build. Additional turbines could provide electricity for other energy needs.

“There is a lot of talk among politicians that we need a massive jobs program to pull the economy out of the current recession,” Jacobson said. “Well, putting people to work building wind turbines, solar plants, geothermal plants, electric vehicles and transmission lines would not only create jobs but would also reduce costs due to health care, crop damage and climate damage from current vehicle and electric power pollution, as well as provide the world with a truly unlimited supply of clean power.”

Jacobson said that while some people are under the impression that wind and wave power are too variable to provide steady amounts of electricity, his research group has already shown in previous research that by properly coordinating the energy output from wind farms in different locations, the potential problem with variability can be overcome and a steady supply of baseline power delivered to users.

During the recent presidential campaign, nuclear power and clean coal were often touted as energy solutions that should be pursued, but nuclear power and coal with carbon capture and sequestration were Jacobson’s lowest-ranked choices after biofuels. “Coal with carbon sequestration emits 60- to 110-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy, and nuclear emits about 25-times more carbon and air pollution than wind energy,” Jacobson said. Although carbon-capture equipment reduces 85-90 percent of the carbon exhaust from a coal-fired power plant, it has no impact on the carbon resulting from the mining or transport of the coal or on the exhaust of other air pollutants. In fact, because carbon capture requires a roughly 25-percent increase in energy from the coal plant, about 25 percent more coal is needed, increasing mountaintop removal and increasing non-carbon air pollution from power plants, he said.

Nuclear power poses other risks. Jacobson said it is likely that if the United States were to move more heavily into nuclear power, then other nations would demand to be able to use that option.

“Once you have a nuclear energy facility, it’s straightforward to start refining uranium in that facility, which is what Iran is doing and Venezuela is planning to do,” Jacobson said. “The potential for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon or for states to develop nuclear weapons that could be used in limited regional wars will certainly increase with an increase in the number of nuclear energy facilities worldwide.” Jacobson calculated that if one small nuclear bomb exploded, the carbon emissions from the burning of a large city would be modest, but the death rate for one such event would be twice as large as the current vehicle air pollution death rate summed over 30 years.

Finally, both coal and nuclear energy plants take much longer to plan, permit and construct than do most of the other new energy sources that Jacobson’s study recommends. The result would be even more emissions from existing nuclear and coal power sources as people continue to use comparatively “dirty” electricity while waiting for the new energy sources to come online, Jacobson said.

From the Newsweek teaser on the 2008 presidential race,

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

I have to disagree with our president-elect. He is now our leader. He has to lead us: sometimes by words, sometimes by example.

But he must be reading my blog. It is something collective we must do, and we must be led there. By myself, my few actions will affect nothing. No one at Dominion Power notices that my heat is set low, or that I take warm showers, not hot ones. There is no glacier melting more slowly due to my actions.

It isn’t going to take a village to change where our world is going regarding climate change. It isn’t going to take a nation. It is going to take a world lead well.

Lead well, Mr. President.

First what are these problems? Decreasing energy supplies to go around, higher prices and costs for our energy, and environmental damage.

“But, gas prices are going down!” you are all shouting. But the war for oil: Iraq, Iran and Russia, is still going on. The pollution (a cost of petrochemical fuels) is not going away and needs to be cleaned up.

Will buying an fluorescent bulb stop any of this? No. The bulb still has to be made, packaged, marketed and shipped to a store near me. How about buying a new Hemp shower curtain to replace my evil PVC shower curtain? Not if my old shower curtain is still OK.

And the United States’ huge debt to everyone else is not good for anyone. Bankruptcy is not good for anyone. And that is where the United States is.

If you have to buy something, buy something sustainable. Let’s not dig the hole any deeper.

If you can get away from buying it, don’t.

I used to believe that it was good to buy things from China and from other third world countries since it would increase their standard of living and thus they would need to buy things from us. But that was before I understood the lack of environmental regulations and the loss of jobs here. I still want everyone (not just Americans and Europeans) to have a good standard of living, but I do not know how to make that happen. Some economists would say that it can’t happen. There is just not enough “stuff” to go around.

But I want there to be.

Does anyone else remember being a kid and having Mom say “Eat this, there are children starving in China.”? So, if I don’t buy that shower curtain, is there one extra for someone in China? Is there something left for them?

I, like John McCain, need to understand the economics of this more. But, if I use solar power, a wind turbine, a south facing home, I am leaving some energy out there in more traditional forms for others to use. If energy is the linchpin of economics, and from everything I have read, it is, then that more than anything increases everyone’s standard of living.

So what have I rambles around to? An Answer.

Using alternative energy is the only way to increase everyone’s standard of living.

The state of Alaska has filed a lawsuit in federal district court (District of Columbia) challenging the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming. The Act was hailed as a breakthrough political gesture that officially acknowledged global warming as a threat to life.

Alaska’s Governor Sarah Palin claims that the act to protect the bears will affect offshore oil and gas operations off the northern coast of the state.

“The State of Alaska’s challenge to the protection of the polar bear is a lost cause based on discredited, industry-funded attacks on science. This case has no merit, and the Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC, and Greenpeace will be seeking to intervene in the lawsuit and have it dismissed”, said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity, and lead author of the 2005 petition to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

“The state of Alaska’s response is disappointing, but certainly no surprise. They have taken their cues from industry every step of the way”, added Andrew Wetzler, director of NRDC Endangered Species Project.

The following post on this very website inspired me to do a little research about the environmental benefits of vegetarianism. I have been a vegetarian for over three years now (of course, I choose to overlook the once-in-a-while “breakdowns” that I am prone to). And though the switch had little to do with the environment and more with animal-cruelty, I figured that awareness about the environmental benefits of vegetarianism will only help strengthen my resolve.

Usually I steer clear from getting all preachy about vegetarianism, for two reasons. One, I don’t think preaching helps in this matter, really..the desire has to come from within. Two, I don’t want to go on a tirade about the evils of meat-eating one day and get caught stuffing in meaty somethings the next (although I am happy to report that that hasn’t happened in a while). So this post is for the almost-vegetarians. Below I have listed 7 anti meat-eating, hard-hitting facts (from sites such as goveg.com, liveearth.org, un.org etc. ) – just to give weak-resolved vegetarians (like me) something to think about when they are about to pander to their base gastronomical desires.

Here goes:

(1) The meat industry is among the highest producers of greenhouse gases such as carbon-dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide.

(2) University of California reports that it takes 5,214 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef. That’s more than a year of daily showers in exchange for 4 hamburgers.

(3) A third of the total raw material and fossil fuel being currently used in the US goes into raising animals for food.

(4) A major source of deforestation is forests being cleared up for pastures. This is true especially in Latin America where around 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing. Each minute, an area of rain forest as big as 7 football fields is slashed for grazing cattle.

(5) According to Environmental Defense, if every American gave up one meal of chicken per week in favor of a veggie meal, that would be equivalent to removing over half a million cars off U.S. roads, in terms of reduction in carbon emissions.

(6) According to the EPA – chicken, cattle and hog excrement have polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and groundwater in 17 states.

(7) Animals raised for food generate 89,000 pounds of waste per second.

There are tons of other reasons to turn (and stay) veg. But I think for now, I have lost my appetite.